by time, is recognized to this day. The sheets which had been so artistically painted were as elegantly bound. They were covered with silk, velvet, satin, or bright-colored leather, embroidered with gold and pearls, studded with buttons of gold, banded on the corners with shields, and secured with clasps of precious metals engraved and enameled in the very finest style of decorative art. Admirable as the books are, they do not give us a high opinion of the intelligence of the artists, nor of the culture of their owners, for they are full of anachronisms and absurdities in the pictures and in the text.
This taste for elegant books, which began in the thirteenth century, became a princely amusement. In 1373, Charles V of France was the owner of more than nine hundred[1] books, most of which were written on fine vellum, superbly bound, and adorned with precious stones and clasps of silver or gold. His brothers fostered the same taste. Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, gathered around him artists, authors, copyists, and bookbinders, and established a great library. His son, John the Fearless, largely increased it, but the most costly additions were made by Philip the Good, who, at the middle of the fifteenth century, enjoyed the distinction of possessing the most magnificent books in Western Europe. Books of equal beauty were also made in Italy, but there was no part of Europe where calligraphers, miniaturists and ornamental bookbinders found a higher appreciation of their skill than in Burgundy and the Netherlands. Nor did this taste for fine
- ↑ From a catalogue still extant, it appears that this library was composed chiefly of romances, legends, histories, and treatises on astrology, geometry and chiromancy. It was then valued at 2,223 French livres, rather more than the same number of pounds sterling. At this time, the price of a cow was about eight shillings, and of a horse about twenty shillings.—It is difficult to ascertain the real value of the money of the middle ages. Coins were frequently clipped to light weight by knavish traders, and were oftener debased at the mint when the royal treasury was low. Sellers everywhere knew that the value of a coin was not in its stamp, but in its quantity of silver, and they altered prices to meet the altered value of coin. But even in its most debased form, the silver coin of the middle ages had a very high purchasing capacity.
